Foucault's ethics and disability

What is it about?

The aim of the paper is to demonstrate how Foucault’s ethics, which we understand as a tension between exclusion and emancipation, helps both critically reassess two disability models that prevail in the contemporary literature concerning disability, i.e. the medical model and the social one, and support and inspire an ethical project of including people with disabilities in spheres of life from which they have been excluded by various power/knowledge regimes. We claim, following Foucault, that such a project should be informed by critical reflection on exclusion-generating forms of knowledge about people with disabilities and focused on individual ethical actions fostering self-realisation and emancipation of people with disability.

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Why is it important?

Our argument implies that both the biomedical and the social models of disability should be understood as historically produced and rooted in the dynamic power-knowledge relationships. Each of the models was constructed upon the same mechanisms and in the same historical conjuncture determining the discourse on disability. The difference is that the biomedical model highlights anatomical, physical and psychological properties as criteria of disability, while the social model foregrounds the possibilities of functioning of individuals with disability in society. Still, both models analyse the phenomenon of disability based on the same notion of impairment produced by power-knowledge. On this take, impairment is a biomedical deficiency or a lack of social competences imposed on the body by a scientific discipline that is part of the power-knowledge nexus. This approach has produced primarily accounts of impaired individuals in terms of (countering) their exclusion from social practices, thereby largely failing to give justice to the emancipatory endeavours individuals with disability undertake on their way to self-realisation. Both models largely overlook individual subjective experiences and perceptions that ground emancipatory practices. For this reason, both the biomedical and the social disability models should be approached as methods of identifying, describing and suggesting possible solutions to the problems of people with disabilities rather than as ‘yardsticks’ determining who is disabled and to what degree, or what are the consequences of disability for the individual and society.

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